


We Survive

by LadyLazarus



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Survival, Zombies, sterek
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-07
Updated: 2013-02-07
Packaged: 2017-11-28 12:53:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/674617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyLazarus/pseuds/LadyLazarus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Hold it, Stiles! Hold it!” Stiles’ face looked wan and tired, his pale face even more pale under the greenish light streaming through the hospital corridor where they were holed up against the outside. Derek was frantic, searching for anything to occupy himself against bursting through their barricade and decimating every single thing outside.</p><p>From the prompt: "We found love in a hopeless place." Written for a fanfic class.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Survive

“Hold it, Stiles! Hold it!” Stiles’ face looked wan and tired, his pale face even more pale under the greenish light streaming through the hospital corridor where they were holed up against the outside. Derek was frantic, searching for anything to occupy himself against bursting through their barricade and decimating every single _thing_ outside. Stiles laughed.

“Why are you _laughing_?!” hissed Derek, quickly crossing the distance between them and clutching at Stiles’ shoulders. Too hard – he winced.

“I just think it’s funny. How many times we kept me almost dying a secret from everyone, and how many of those stupid zombie games I played. You know, I thought once, if we really were in a zombie apocalypse, we’d win. We’re the good guys Derek. We win. The good guys always survive.” He chuckled to himself, his head drooping lower to his chest. For a brief, inappropriate moment, Derek remembered how he had always wanted to be this close to Stiles, to hear these innermost thoughts, to be close enough to see the delicate shadows that would play across the boy’s – man’s – neck.

“We’re the good guys, Stiles. We survive. We win,” he affirmed. Derek’s eyes flashed red, stricken and pained against his darkening thoughts.

Moans and the _sh, sh_ noise of dragging appendages drifted around the corner into Derek’s ears. His heightened senses had kept them alive so much longer than others in Beacon Hills. They were almost the last alive. The Argents, thought dead, had been a killing blow to Scott, but after a chance encounter, he had left with them to give them a better chance with his hearing, speed and strength since Derek and Stiles were sufficient on their own. It was a regular love story – Allison and Scott, and the two were better off separated from Derek and Stiles.

“Stiles, come on, I can hear them.” Stiles’ head lolled up to gaze into Derek’s eyes. His brown eyes, once bright and cheerful, dimmed to a melancholy glow fixed Derek to the spot, one hand on Stiles’ shoulder, knee bent to the ground like he was genuflecting.

“What if we just let them?” Silence. Derek couldn’t even hear the dead shuffling closer anymore. There was only the two of them in this dingy green corridor with the stars bright out and infinite in their sad twinkling. There was only two breaths mingling in sour air between two mouths that had never met and abandoned hospital beds with bloody sheets and broken syringes. Dirty linoleum.

“I can’t. I can’t let  you do that. What would I do? We’re the good guys, Stiles! We _survive_! That’s what we’re doing, we’re surviving. We’re gonna get to the basement and get out through the sewer. We’re gonna get through the forest. We’re gonna meet the Argents in the Sierras. We’re gonna head to Alaska. We’re gonna survive. That’s the plan Stiles. We _survive_.” Stiles’ lips had thinned to a line, his brow furrowing as he moved his hand from his wounded side to his pack at his side.

Derek moved his hand over the cloth on Stile’s side to keep pressure on it, hoping against hope that it was starting to clot enough that they could start moving. The paper-scrape shuffle of the zombies was nearing. Stiles pulled something out, closed in a fist and breathed out raggedly as he opened his hand. Three purple-fuchsia pills.

“No. How—”

“Deaton. Before they bit him. It’s enough Derek. I know you can’t, but I can’t either. I’m just a human. You’re not immune either. But… But this is enough. In case.”

“No, Stiles. We _survive_!” The mantra had become Derek’s only religion. It was his God against zombies and Stiles dying and wolfsbane pills. It was his God against humanity and being alone. It was his God against everyone he loved ever dying. Rude, traitorous tears fell from Derek’s clenched eyes as Stiles shushed him and with his good hand, held his neck and rubbed circles into his dirt-smudged skin with his thumb.

“No,” Derek said suddenly, jerking back and wiping away his tears, “We’re not doing this. Ever. Get up. We’re going. They’re too close. Get up Stiles. You can do it.” Stiles huffed out a despondent sigh and put the pills into his pocket. He left the now mostly empty pack on the ground, its supplies exhausted.

“Ok.”

Derek grabbed Stiles’ arm, draping it across his broad shoulders and holding Stiles’ around the waist, quickly rushing them down the stairway that opened up from a door next to them. They descended the stairs, less quickly than Derek was hoping, but still at a pace that would keep them ahead. Spotting a fire extinguisher, Derek ripped it off the wall and carried it as they went.

They got to the basement level and Stiles directed them toward the utility access areas until they found a large fan covering that opened to the lower air ducts and eventually the sewer system.  Stiles let go of Derek and leaned up against a rack of old defibrillators, no use against this sort of stopped heart. Derek pulled off the fine grate in a desperate yank, thanking whatever God was left in this world for his supernatural strength. He jammed the extinguisher into the spinning fan and turned away as it bent the fan blades and the extinguisher was punctured, spreading CO2 foam everywhere. Derek bent more of the fan blade back from their center like folding petals and turned to Stiles, motioning for him to go through the newly opened tunnel. After Stiles was through, Derek ben the blades back and kicked out the husk of the extinguisher, spinning the blades to get them back up to speed. He waited for a bit to see if they would continue.

Satisfied, he turned back to Stiles, who was looking better, but it was hard to tell. It may just be the adrenaline rush of the escape and his flushed skin alleviating the pallor from earlier. They hobbled together through more of the ducts until they got to a grate in the floor. The tunnel below them was smaller and they’d have to crouch-walk through, but the sewage was fortunately not high enough to get into Stiles’ wound. Derek wasted no time pulling off the metal and helping lower Stiles through. Derek followed, pulling the grate back over his head. While they were in the sewage tunnel, Derek pulled the gun out from his waistband of his jeans on his backside and kept an ear and eye out behind and ahead of them.

There were a few twists and turns, but eventually they came to a larger section of tunnel as they came out more to the watershed where the sewage run off into the nearby creek. It was very environmentally friendly.

Derek tore off the thick chicken wire screening that covered the tunnel exit and they stumbled out to fresh air and moonlit forest. Beacon Hills was behind them, but the danger wasn’t gone. Whatever fever dream Derek was having before in the air duct was gone. Stiles was definitely _not_ looking better. The cloth they were using to staunch the bleeding was soaked and dripping.

The zombie that had gotten Stiles was, coincidentally, Mr. Harris. It seemed that even in the undead afterlife, Adrian Harris had it out for Stiles. He didn’t get a bite in, but he had sure torn up Stiles’ side with long nasty claws. It was like their nails became sharp after they died, and Stiles would be the first to attest to it. Needless to say, Mr. Harris also got Stiles’ last bullet to the brain with a good few expletives and bad chemistry puns thrown in for good measure.

Stiles was coughing as they trekked further uphill, vainly trying to quicken their pace. After one hacking wheeze, Stiles’ fist came away with blood. The piercing metallic sent punched Derek in the gut and he staggered over a log as his head whipped back to sniff at Stiles.

“No,” was all he said, glaring at Stiles. Derek tilted back his head and howled up to the moonless night, features shifted into wolfish consternation. It was only the briefest of instances before he heard an answering yowl, a trill that contained the sadness of the news Derek delivered to Scott. They weren’t far. There was only a couple miles to the rendezvous point and it was unlikely that they would meet any zombies on the way.

Fortunately whatever bioweapon had been released, it had not been long enough ago that the zombies were venturing far out of the cities, still finding fresh humans to devour among the alleyways and deserted train depots. They pushed on.

The way was difficult and took much longer than it should have, but Stiles was deteriorating quickly against Derek’s side until the last half mile had him wrapped in Derek’s arms bridal-style. Stiles found it very ironic actually, the position they were in, though he’d never tell Derek to his face. If he heard Stiles joke, he was afraid the werewolf might not be able to recover from the emotional whiplash. Finally they broke into a copse, met with three loaded barrels.

Three. Not four.

“Oh my god, Stiles!” Allison was the first to recover, rushing to see to Stiles’ side, the only one besides Chris with any idea how to treat serious wounds. Derek had always just healed. How was he to know anything about bandaids and boo boos?

“Where’s Isaac?” asked Derek, relinquishing his bleeding bundle. Scott looked to the ground. Hi hands were shaking.

“Had to put him down. One of them fell off a roof onto him by chance and ripped out his throat. He – he asked me to do it.” Derek reached out to clap a hand onto Scott’s shoulder. It was another hopeless death. Isaac, Boyd, Lydia, the Sheriff…

“It’s – We – It’s a different world, Scott.” It was the most Derek could offer.

“We’ve gotta get going. There’s a cabin ahead we can rest in. It’s got a root cellar of supplies. It was our panic shelter when we were just hunting werewolves. Tomorrow we need to get started up the mountains to Alaska. It’ll be tricky through Canada. They’ve closed their borders tight and we don’t all have documents,” Chris urged. He was right. The trek would be tough itself, but the bureaucracy would be hell.

At the cabin, cots were pulled out and in the one bed they laid Stiles, unconscious and delicate. He was the whitest orchid to Derek. Fragile, brilliant, pale, and so swift to wilt at any moment. His bleeding had stopped, but he was weak. The Argent cabin fortunately had a few medical supplies and Allison did everything she could to sterilize and wrap the wound. It was ghastly and ragged and Allison came away from his side with the practiced look all nurses had after tending the good as dead.

They ate, and Stiles managed to swallow a few bites after being roused, but he went back to sleep immediately afterwards. Derek never left his side, his hand holding Stiles’ arm softly, so afraid any touch would cause his skin to peel away like paper ash, to flutter away in the wind like some grim moths into the night air.

It was at the earliest dawn when Stiles awoke. The others were all sleeping save Derek who was concentrating on Stiles’ face. It was serene. It was wretchedly serene. It _hurt_.

“Please—”

“Derek, stop. Listen to me. I’m not gonna make it. I’m not at all. And I can’t let go of you either. I need you to hear me. Look at me. Goddamn it, Sourwolf, look at me!” Derek’s gaze returned to Stiles’ glassy eyes, made shinier by the tears daring to drop from his long lashes. He knew his own eyes matched, “I know you don’t want to go on without me. I know you want to take those pills. I want to be selfish enough to make you take them right now, but I can’t do that. I can’t be that selfish. I need to be _more_ selfish, so promise me. _Promise_ you’ll go on. Promise me you’ll help the others and you’ll live. We survivors right? We’re the good guys and we survive. We go on. I know you haven’t said it in so many words, but, Derek, I lo—”

“ _Don’t make me promise that and then say those words,_ ” seethed Derek. He was livid, “Pick one. Make me promise or tell me you’ll let me die.”

“You know which I’ll choose.”

“Stiles…”

“Kiss me. You’ve nev—” He couldn’t finish the thought before Derek’s lips were on him, hungrily seeking out the comfort of Stiles’ intimacy. So many wasted moments now flashed through Derek’s mind, encouraging his desperation in the kiss, all the moments before the epidemic when he lingered too close to Stiles and threatened him so emptily as an excuse to close in on his long throat, all the moments when Stiles chose to care for Derek beyond necessity, before others.

Their lives were wastes – barren and ludicrous in their heavenly designs before this moment, before Stiles’ body became slack and jelly against Derek’s lips and Stiles’ warm breath became a cold shudder and his eyes held life no more.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys! I'm not abandoning Inside-Out. This was for a Uni assignment, but also a nice breather from I-O. I might do a one shot like this once in a while between chapters to clear my head. Let me know what you think! Find me on Tumblr at Foolproofpoem.


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